Hotfish says Finding Nemo rocksTheres this guy called Mark Walters that I've known for some time on the web now. He gets to go to all these cool press screenings of upcoming movies. He got a chance to see PIXAR'S new movie Finding Nemo, and he says it rocks.

Cold Black CoffeeSometime back, at home, I was drinking coffee and enjoying it immensely, but then something came along that distracted me long enough for the coffee to get cold. When I turned my attention to the cup again, it still had some coffee in it. Cold coffee. You know that feeling of dread you get when you just know that the next sip won't taste good at all, and yet you just want to go ahead and taste it one more time, thus ruining the whole experience of that particular cup of coffee? I felt that.

Black coffee should be strong, bitter and threaten your tongue with permanent damage. It should fume and when you get close to it, inspire respect. Throwing it on your lap should spell doom and second degree burns at the very least. Cold black coffee is none of these things. It's harmless, tastes like watery sand and doesn't inspire respect. It is but a memory of what it once was. You know it won't live up to your mental image of how it should taste in your mouth. You know it was great at some point, but that point has come and gone. Yet, you're strangely tempted to give it one more try. I've felt this way about some relationships in the past.

I didn't take another sip of that cup of coffee. I just dumped it and let it go. The taste in my mouth was much better than anything it could have offered me.

Sumimasen, osoku narimashita.Konnichiwa. I've been busy changing jobs, hence the lack of updates. Though the juicy HL2 update should tide you for some time. This for the benefit of all of you who have never been to Megatokyo. Go crowd Piro's phat pipe. And get an education on storytelling and art. Bai Bai.

Sam's Half Life 2 ImpressionsSince the first Half-Life, every other shooter has just been trying to insert these cinematic sequences into the gameplay. Running through a collapsing building, diving from a plane at 30,000 feet with no parachute or escaping a sinking tanker aren't unfamiliar tasks to the average gamer anymore. These experiences were intense and exciting, to be sure, but the problem with them is that the solution to these obstacles is always the same. You can insert multiple paths, but you're still witnessing a static world dictated to react in a specific way. No matter what you do, the same thing will always happen in the same place and the same time.

What Half-Life 2 appears to do is create an environment where you can't tell if these things are dictated prior or are changing based on your actions. While you're still presented with the same basic situations every time you play, the result of those situations can have a greater change based on what you do and how the AI decides to react to that situation. A good example from one of the videos is a when Gordon Freeman gets into a gunfight with a trooper and then decides to retreat to a nearby building. Once in the building he pushes a table in front of the door. The trooper tries to open the door and fails, so he starts to shoot through the windows instead. Taking cover behind an old appliance, he retreats up some stairs just as the soldiers (now there's two) kick the door in. The stairs end just in front of a window, and another soldier is visible outside for only a split second before he begins firing. The glass shatters and the shutters flap with each bullet that passes through. There's another soldier up the second flight of stairs, so Gordon uses an antigravity weapon to rip a radiator from a wall and effectively use it as a shield to allow for a safe ascent. Once near the top of the stairs, he uses his weapon to rocket the radiator at the soldier, clearing his path. This same weapon allows Freeman to knock a pile of mattresses and other junk down the stairs, so the soldiers behind can't follow. All of this occurring completely in-game, without any kind of pre-scripting. Had Gordon simply not decided to block the door off, the situation would have unraveled in a completely different fashion. This is the kind of shit I've been waiting to see in gaming since I started gaming. An interactive world with believable reactions from its characters. If someone were writing a thesis on why gaming has the potential to kick the shit out of the movie industry, Half-Life 2 would be the ideal example of why.

My Stupid Matrix JokeWhy cant you have any soup in the Matrix?
Because THERE IS NO SPOON!

Heh.

Anyways, so Real Life left Keenspot. Aside from Sinfest and RPG World, I think this was the most popular one they had. This is important news. Greg Dean is one guy I've always supported all these years, and this is cool. AND he's using PHP. Now that's nice.

Tatsuya Ishida SaysScience has replaced Religion as our main delusion. We worship Reason and Rationality as blindly as we once did Dogma and Superstition. Soon we will be a shining Utopia of genetically perfect emotionless spock clones functioning with robotic precision and efficiency.

hmmmSometimes I find myself awake in a haze like I’m looking out at the world through foggy windows. I can’t close my eyes and drift off into the oblivion of sleep. I’m poised waiting for something to happen and it never happens. I can’t seem to let go of the day. The night reaches a certain hour when I realize that it’s past the point of a good nights rest and I will be going through most of tomorrow trying to wake up.